Metaphorically speaking, the pieces are: a basket, some boxes,
and a cape that covers these objects. Two of the boxes are dark and
closed, one is open on one side, the last one is a transparent box.
The basket envelops the museum.

The dark boxes are the conference halls (large and small), the
transparent box is an exhibition hall (for all sorts of objects)
and the semi-open box is the research centre. The whole ensemble is
covered by a flexible, waving sheet that shelters the various
pieces.

Image courtesy estudio Juan
Navarro BaldewegScheme

Human evolution and its study and dissemination
in the museum are interpreted as something that has to be
intimately related lo the territory, the land, the geological
strata and nature in general, which is the frame of reference for
all life and the depositary of information; the container for
knowledge that has to be literally dug up.

In other words, the project needs lo include an abstract recreation
of fragments of nature, land and vegetation. So the initial idea
was to create a large structure which holds sections or fragments
of the land, built with architectural tools and resources, in
continuity from a large sloping platform that spreads outside the
building opposite the river with the aspect of part of a gently
sloping hill.

This inclined plane penetrates the museum perimeter that fixes it
with an embracing gesture and forces its link lo the architecture.
The top part of this platform organises the main entrances to the
museum, with a belvedere facing the river and the Cathedral, and
also holds the café and an outdoor area for visitors, benefiting
likewise from the views and the spectacle generated by the museum
and lecturing activities./ Juan Navarro Baldeweg

The museum interior is a large area with abundant top lighting.
It houses the prisms or sections of earth that suggest fragments of
the landscape at the nearby Atapuerca site. lt is easy to imagine
this environment as a greenhouse in which the subsoil also takes on
great visual importance.

The corridors or "gorges" boxed in between the prisms are used
for educational presentations of the geological or paleontological
aspects of the archaeological site. From these corridors one can
appreciate the strata that define and contextualize the deposits of
human and animal bones and the remains of their technology in the
evolutionary process.

What they explain is expressed using architectural resources:
the walls hold the information and at the same lime recreate the
spatial experience of the excavation profiles and the strata of the
land.

AI the rear of these large prisms trays or areas are set aside
for a more conventional part of the museum, for objects and
installations on three floors. These floors are linked by ramps
that permit cross-views of them and, hence their exhibition areas,
with the possibility of integrating their contents.

The basic ideas of the project can be summarised
in the image of a landscape that has been cut into strips,
expressed on the basis of a Kitaj painting; gorges like the "double
negative" land art, created by artist Michael Heizer, in which
the visitor's steps are accompanied by the strata of the walls. It
is all sheltered by a folded, cut out and obliquely diverted roof,
generated from a continuous film. The expression of this idea is
accompanied by a chair in a cubist perspective, produced by Picasso
on paper.

/ Juan Navarro Baldeweg

Image courtesy estudio Juan Navarro
Baldeweg

The building structure is both concrete and mixed concrete -
steel. The siding material is a double screen system that combines
transparent and silver glass opaque glazed surfaces, steel panels
and amber stone. The roof is also aluminium and glass.